


Feeling It

by sanva



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Character Death, Empathy, Gen, Ratings: PG
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-16
Updated: 2011-04-16
Packaged: 2017-10-18 04:06:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/184786
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sanva/pseuds/sanva
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Empath!Dean</p>
            </blockquote>





	Feeling It

  


 

The first time he felt it was when he was three. It wasn't horrible, aching, painful, like you might expect it to be. It was peaceful. A quiet knowing and acceptance, love and warmth, followed by a fading stillness. He had accepted it then as just another part of life. Back then Dean hadn't known what it was—it was beyond the comprehension of his toddler mind. All Dean knew was that the golden retriever that had been his best friend since birth, his fathers for sixteen years, had loved him and gone. Disappeared but leaving behind a piece of himself—a feeling in Dean.

It wasn't bad, like some of the others. It wasn't accompanied by yelling or tears (which in Dean's mind was always followed by warmth and sorry). If he'd lived a normal life perhaps it never would have been.

The second time he felt it was when he was four. It was filled with an ache and a dark pain like no other he'd felt. Worry, sadness, a prickly sensation followed by dark aching abyss. There was no peace, acceptance, a piece left to fill an aching void.

He'd felt it that night, it and everything else. His father's anger, disbelief, horror, worry, love, helplessness. It was the first time Dean had felt helplessness from his father that he could remember. It had brought him there, into the hall. It and everything, his father and the confusion-muddled feeling of pain from his brother.

His brother hadn't stopped feeling that way for weeks.

Dean was there to accept the bundle from his father and he ran. He did what he was told—the urgency pushing clawing feeling of hurry aching deep within his being.

In the years to come it would be a silent presence. Always there, maybe not daily or weekly, but present all the same. As he grew older it was there more. Every hunt, every body, every time he wasn't fast enough, strong enough, knowledgeable enough.

It didn't ache as much as it had when he was four. There was no deep investment on his part. Dean worked to save them, did his best, but it was not entirely the same.

The next time he felt it so deep and desperate was when he was twenty-seven and holding his brother's body to him in the middle of a muddy road in Cold Oak. It hadn't been this bad when his father . . . but then he'd been fresh back from somewhere else and things had been dim. The physical phantom aches of the hospital had made it difficult to feel . . . Dean didn't like hospitals. He avoided staying there for long if he could.

But still he felt the void in a way, not as bad or as strong. His Dad had given his own soul for him, though. So in a way there had been a piece. And there had been a knowing acceptance during their last conversation. Dean should have known.

With Sam it was different. His last true tie to people around him. Bobby was left but there wasn't as much between them. Dean had raised his brother, his Sammy. They'd been attached by it, held together by strings of love and brotherly bonds- even through Standford. There had always been that feeling passing to him from the younger man. All that was left was void. Dark, painful, sparking and bleeding into darkness, an abyss of cold and alone.

The last time he felt it was his death. It was different. There was a physical ache, a tearing so deep and harsh . . . The pain he felt was worse than Sam's death. The feeling was gone. All that was left in hell was the suffering and darkness and pain. There was no good, no flutters of warmth he felt when passing children playing in their yards, girls flirting . . . there was no good, no warmth. And there was no pieces anymore, nothing, just a shattered painful feeling.

Dean hadn't thought anything could be worse than those days he spent without Sam's feeling after Cold Oak . . . but nothing could compare to knowing he'd spend an enternity without it.

Nothing.


End file.
